Chas Freeman - Playing War Games with China

Below is the introductory paragraphs of an article by Chas Freeman. The full article can be viewed at Playing at War Games with China    – Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (chasfreeman.net)

Playing at War Games with China   
Remarks to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
By video link, Washington, D.C.  11 February 2021

Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon decided to ignore Napoleon’s advice to “let [China] sleep, for when it wakes it will astonish the world.”[1]  I was there when China opened its eyes.  And I have watched it transform the various orders of the world and become an American obsession.

Every generation of Americans feels obliged to reinvent the China policies it inherits from its predecessor.  We can be sure our country will eventually get its policies right – after we’ve exhausted all the alternatives.  But we have not yet done so.  And, for many reasons, our latest policies toward China are almost certain to prove self-defeating.

We have just exited the most bizarre presidency in our history.  One of its distinguishing characteristics was the substitution in our foreign relations of unrestricted economic warfare for diplomacy.  Bluster and bullying replaced dialogue and reason aimed at convincing the recalcitrant to see that it could be in their interest as well as ours for them to do things our way.

In the last half of the last century, we Americans made the rules.  Others got into the habit of following us.  To some extent, that habit – though fading – has outlasted our adherence to the principles we once stood for.  So military posturing, economic intimidation, diatribe, and attempted regime change are becoming the norm in international relations.  China is a case in point.  Sino-American relations now exemplify Freeman’s third law of strategic dynamics: for every hostile act there can be an even more hostile reaction.

Americans have an inbuilt missionary impulse.  We enjoy protecting, tutoring, lecturing, and hectoring other peoples on how to correct their character to approximate our idealized image of ourselves.  We are offended when others insist on independence from us and on preserving their own political culture.  China has never wavered in its determination to do both, wishful thinking by American politicians and pundits notwithstanding.

In America’s pas de deux with China, we have consistently been the initiator of the dance and taken the lead.  We developed some well-founded complaints about Chinese economic behavior, so we launched a trade war with it.  We were alarmed about China’s potential to outcompete us internationally, so we decided to try to cripple it with an escalating campaign of “maximum pressure.”  We saw China as a threat to our continued military primacy, so we sought to contain and encircle it.  Cumulatively, we have:

• declared China to be an adversary and called for regime change in Beijing;
• launched an invective-filled global propaganda campaign against China, its ruling Communist Party, and its fumbled initial response to COVID-19;
• sanctioned allies and partners for failing to curtail their own dealings with China;
• replaced market-driven trade with China with government management of economic exchanges based on tariffs, quotas, sanctions, and export bans;
• abandoned or attempted to sabotage international organizations in which we deemed Chinese influence to be greater than ours;
• kneecapped the WTO, trashing the rule-bound order for international economic relations we had taken seven decades to elaborate;
• attempted to block Chinese investment and lending in third countries;
• blacklisted Chinese companies and delisted them on our stock markets;
• curtailed visas, criminalized scientific exchanges, and banned technology exports to China;
• closed a Chinese consulate (losing one of our own as a result) and initiated tit-for-tat reductions in reporting by journalists;
• sought to terminate Chinese sponsorship of language teaching in our country, and discouraged in-country study by potential federal employees;
• reidentified the United States with Beijing’s civil war adversary in Taipei and violated the Taiwan-related terms of U.S. normalization with Beijing;
• stepped up provocative air and sea patrols along China’s borders; and
• begun to reconfigure both our conventional and nuclear forces to fight a war with China in its near seas or on its claimed and established territory.

These actions have gotten China’s attention, much as they got Japan’s when we applied a range of considerably less hostile measures to it in 1941.  Japan reacted by attacking Pearl Harbor.  China has not yet lost its cool....